


scheherazade / summer’s over when I die

by notallwindows



Series: mortem est: bunny's demise [2]
Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Gun Violence, Murder, Suicide, Time Travel, basically all the trigger warnings that canon has
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-24
Updated: 2019-09-24
Packaged: 2020-10-27 13:34:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20761190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notallwindows/pseuds/notallwindows
Summary: Richard Papen, time-traveller. Bunny Cocoran, unfortunate deceased.





	scheherazade / summer’s over when I die

**Author's Note:**

> “Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means  
we’re inconsolable.”  
Richard Siken, Scheherazade

I snap my fingers. 

I snap them again. 

Sometimes, the key to getting it right is to want it enough. 

I think of Bunny, of his swagger, and think: _ if this isn’t wanting it enough, I don’t know what is. _A hook under my navel, and I feel myself being compressed, like a washcloth being wrung out. 

And then I am gone. 

⌛︎

Are there any perks to being a time-traveller? Depends on who you ask. It doesn’t suck, but after a while you understand what they mean by “an exercise in futility”. 

⌛︎

Bunny’s funeral. Francis’ eyes are red-rimmed, but his look is cool. He’s dressed in the finest black silk, and we’re behind the shed, a moment of respite away from the prying eyes of the family. He’s unbuckling his pants, and the silver clinks. I close my eyes, and think, _ I’m not here for this _, and I snap my fingers. 

⌛︎

This time I’m at the cliff-top, and Bunny isn’t there yet. Francis is forlornly kicking at the undergrowth (my eyes linger, only just a while, on his lips), and Camilla’s petite hands are resting on a tree. Henry is looking around, and this is the most unsure I’ve seen him look. 

I hear a voice, and I realise Bunny is approaching us. Bunny, in the flesh. 

He says some stupid shit, like, “What are you doing up here?”, and before Henry can take a step towards him, I am stepping towards him. 

“Bunny, _ run _! He’s going to kill you!” 

I don’t like the way my voice cracks on the crucial syllable, but it does the trick. Henry pauses, turns towards me instead. Am I surprised to see him composed? He holds his hand out, and of course. Henry, born to rule, always has a plan. Even in the face of an insurgency, his own men turning against him. 

To Bunny, he says, “Richard’s confused.”

To me, he says, “why don’t you take a hike?”, and he’s smiling. Up close, I can see the hard glint in his eyes, but to Bunny, an outsider, this must seem like nothing more than a friendly reunion. Unexpected, yes, but friendly nonetheless. 

He takes a step towards me, and I can hear the gasp from Charles as his palm connects solidly with my chest. The broken sob from Camilla, Francis’ confused scuttling of feet. I think I should have expected this but nonetheless, it takes me unaware. My arms pinwheel uselessly for a moment (just like Bunny’s did), and I trip backwards. I am weightless for a moment, suspended in the air. But it doesn’t last, and I plunge head-first into that ravine, and Bunny is screaming bloody murder above. 

“_Bunny, stop _ ,” I think, “_people’ll come._”

“_Bunny, _ ” I think, “ _ shut the fuck up _.” 

“_If you don’t stop, you’ll be next_,” I think. “_This was supposed to be you_.” 

“_What an useless idiot,_” I think. “_Haven’t you learnt a thing about screaming, after that episode at Henry’s apartment after the first murder._” 

I snap my fingers, and the pull of gravity is replaced by a pull no less compelling. When Henry and the rest peer cautiously over the ravine, they’ll see that it’s empty. 

I can almost hear Francis scrambling, “where is he? Where is Richard?” and I think, _ I should have slept with you once before I died. _

But I don’t. I fall into an armchair, and my shoulders jerk instinctively, expecting the hard crush of stone. Instead, the soft cushion of leather. 

Bunny starts from eating his angel food cake in the couch opposite me (we are in the lounge; I wish I could tell you what instance this was, but he steals from the pantry so often I can hardly tell). We are so close, I can count the number of hairs in his eyebrow. His brown pupils are like marbles, glass marbles, reflecting the rays of the setting sun from the window. I want to reach out and flick his eyes, see how far they’ll bounce out of his sockets. 

“Richard old man,” he says through a mouthful of crumbs, “want a slice?”

“Jesus Christ, Bunny,” I swear, burying my head in my hands. 

I feel fond and repulsed and desperate all at once. I want to smack him upside his head, and hold both his hands firmly, at the same time (I knew he would scream something derogatory, but I want to hold him, feel his solid hand and know that he was living, _ is _ living). 

I think, _ I don’t have time for this _, and I steel my heart and snap. There is no pull at my navel, no horrible squeeze. My hand flies off my face, and Bunny is still staring at me. Other than his mouth, chewing up and down, the rest of his face is still, watching me. 

_ Oh, so he’s the confused one. _

I realise I have nothing more to say to him, and that if I stared at him another moment I might be sick from the mixture of disgust and relief roiling inside of me. It is a split-second decision. I push my chair back, and it is a heavy armchair, scraping against the carpet. 

“Goodbye Bunny,” I say, turning and walking away. I felt like Orpheus; if I turned back and looked, Bunny would dissolve. Disappear, back into whichever Hell or underworld he came from, Christian or Greek or Roman. Perhaps even just my own personal hell. 

Behind me, Bunny is cursing around mouthfuls of cake, and I leave him to it. I wonder how many more of those cakes he’ll eat before his untimely death at age twenty-four, and if anyone in our building ever connected the dots and realised that the cakes in the fridge stopped going missing around the time Bunny did. And if anyone did: on what occasion is it appropriate to mention that the newly deceased was a kleptomaniac? 

I walk out of the housing, and the walkway is chilly. I curse, and snap my fingers trying to think of that expression that I’ve long forgotten, about the fool and the south wind. In my pajamas, I look around. The poplar trees are shedding their last red and orange leaves, and it is that time of the day when the sky is that brilliant shade as Phoebus Apollo’s wagon magnificently traverses the sky. 

And all of a sudden, I see the Greek building, with the vines clinging to the walls. The building isn’t pale but washed aglow in red. I can think of nothing but blood, and the fact that we’ll never be six again, never will I hear Bunny wrongly conjugate a locative again, and I feel sick with longing for the enchanted past, irrevocably gone. 

No, just gone. Not _ irrevocably _, if I can help it. 

_ Snap _. 

⌛︎

This time, I wake up at _ mandolin Leo’s _ house, and I’m on the hardwood floor in my thin, dirty blanket with my teeth chattering and my whole body numb. It can’t be morning yet– the moon is the only thing bright through the hole in the ceiling, and I can see the snow blowing in in ceaseless sheets of white. I think of dying, and I can barely make a sound when my middle finger rubs soundlessly against my thumb. I feel like the orphan girl in that fairy tale, lighting matches and making wishes. Dying alone in the freezing cold. 

It works somehow, and I feel myself fold into itself, my skin nothing more than a blood bag to keep the bones and the chills in. 

I think of Spongebob, of the episode that aired when I was a kid, sitting on the carpet back in my house in Plano playing idly with a toy car. I was driving it back and forth on the stringy mat, although every now and then it would snag on a thread. The red light of the setting sun washing over the television. _ ( _ _ Warm. Everything then was so warm. I’ll never be warm again, after that winter.) _

_ I was born with glass bones and paper skin. Every morning I break my legs, and every night I break my arms. At night, I lie awake in agony until my heart attacks put me to sleep. _

⌛︎

Maybe it was the thinking about the Midwest, because I land in my old bedroom, on my bed. I sit up, groggy. 

It is late afternoon, and it’s always so bloody hot in July (don’t ask me how: I just know it is July). I kick aside balls of paper from my bed with my socked feet, and feel a burning despair at being back in that stupid simple town of mine. The smell of dust. 

My head hits the pillow again, the same homely pillow I’ve had since I was born. Instead of the sinking sensation of sleep, the hook at my navel. 

⌛︎

I wake up at a restaurant, four of us minus the twins. Bunny is sneering at me over the menu, and Henry is looking at his nails, subdued anger in his cold eyes. I glance at the menu, and the appetiser is twenty dollars. 

“Say, that’s a nice tweed suit,” Bunny says all of a sudden, voice sweet.

Instantly I’m on guard, because Bunny has never followed up a compliment with anything other than a biting remark. I look down at my suit, and it confirms my suspicion. I remember this herringbone pattern, in just the wrong shade to grey to pass for East Coast. According to Bunny, at least. 

I remember what happened that day. How I re-thrifted this suit the day after, full of shame and ire, after Bunny commented once again on my Californian dressing. I’ve forgotten Bunny could be like this. Forgotten his malice, his bite. 

Long since resigned, I stare at his ruddy face, full of blood and life. I look into his eyes, and I can see his sharp mirth, his glee. 

“You bloody twit,” I think, “I’m trying to save you.” 

⌛︎

How do the logistics of time-travelling work? I can’t answer for sure, only that it works the way I want it to. Sometimes. 

When I next jump in time, I land on my feet in the mud just as I hear the sickening crack of Bunny’s skull hitting a rock in the ravine. 

I wince, but I’m the only one in the group to do so. Henry is calm and handsome, as ever. He brushes his hands in that unaffected manner of his, as if the whole affair had been bloodless. As for the rest, the shock hasn’t sunk in yet. 

“Let’s go,” he says, “there is nothing more to see here.”

He’s right, so I leave quietly the way I came, in an agonising compressing of bodily matter. But I’m so used to it, I hardly feel a thing now. I think, Bunny’s death can’t have hurt that much. For all his sound and fury and bluster in life, he went with surprisingly ease, without quarrel. 

I think of giving up, but I am already mid-jump. 

⌛︎

The ravine is replaced with another body of water, warm and golden under the sun. 

Weialala leia  
Wallala leilala

Camilla’s lovely face, the sweet cadence of her voice. Me, walking alongside her, keeping leisurely pace. Our feet splashing in the cool, clear water. 

Suddenly, her face changes. 

“What is it?” I ask, with a growing sense of unease.

Camilla doesn’t say anything, merely looks down slowly. Her eyes are wide. 

I look too, and see the dark plume of blood blossoming by her foot. 

It is too painful to see now, and I avert my eyes. Must even the most treasured memories be tainted with death, now that Bunny is dead? 

Must everything be about him? I was enraged beyond reason, all of a sudden. 

_ Snap _. 

⌛︎

This time, the room is dimly-lit, and Henry’s mouth is moving, but what he is saying doesn’t make sense. I don’t know where I am, where we are. 

“From my point of view, the best thing that Charles could do right now is to disappear entirely from the face of the earth.” 

I stare at him, mouth gaping, not understanding the look in his eye. The glint, his matter-of-fact pronouncement. _ Charles? Charles Macaulay? _

Banging on the door. Hard, unrelenting. Frantic. For a moment I was afraid the wooden frame might give. But it did not; it flew open and the brass doorknob inflected into the wall, the wall with the wilting flower-patterned wallpaper. For a moment, the figure at the doorway, standing framed in a halo of light. I lifted my hands to my eyes. 

Realising it was Charles made no more sense. It was so bright that it took me a moment to realise the figure was swaying, and that it was not just a trick of the light. Oh yes, he swayed all right (did he seem to be drunk? I had never seen him like that, swaying so viciously, like a willow in the wind), and I felt a rush of need to help him, to steady him to his feet. And then my eyes followed the pendulum of his swinging arm, and realised the shape of the glinting object in the conclusion of his white fist. 

“Charles,” Carmilla said at last, voice hard. “What do you think you’re doing?” 

“Out of the way,” Charles said. His words did not slur, but I could tell he was drunk, now, for sure. 

“So you’ve come to kill me?” Henry said. “Is that it?”

Henry was awfully calm, the finger holding the cigarette hardly trembling at all, and I thought wildly that he must have been kidding. There must have been something that I missed before this, something crucial that could explain this entire episode. 

Somehow during it all, I noticed that the window was open. I focused desperately on the chirrup of the crickets, as Charles whirled unsteadily on one feet. The scrap of his boot against the carpet.

“You bastard,” he sneered, hard lines on his ugly, white, face. It took me a moment to realise the one he was turning on was me. “I trusted you. You told him where I was.” 

It is hard to think facing the glinting barrel of a gun. 

Then– something happened. Henry opened that fool mouth of his again, and quick as a flash, Charles was raising his arm in deadly aim and a glass of wine flew at him from god knows where. Four bursts of sound. Four rounds– with the first, the shatter of a windowpane. With the second, the dull lodging of metal in wood. And with the third, I heard not the sound but felt the warm, stinging sensation in my navel. 

_ Oh my god _ , I think. _ I’m shot. I’ve been shot. How utterly inconsequential, but it seems like I’ve been shot. _

The hand on my stomach comes away dark and wet, and there is a charred smell from the singed hole in my shirt. I feel a throbbing, and I felt my entire existence narrowed down to that pulsing wet epicentre. I was dimly aware of Charles and Henry wrestling some distance away, and Henry must have been doing an impressive job of prising a gun away from a drunk, because when I looked up, he was holding it, panting. His fringe clung together, and for a moment I could make out that white scar over his eyebrow. 

There was a ruckus outside the door, and no one seemed to be paying me any attention. 

_ Should I sit down? _

Francis was clawing at his face. “Oh my god oh my god ohmygod–” 

Time seemed to be glitching, moving in static patches. _ This must be my max, _ I realised, clutching at my stomach. _ This must be caused by my time-travelling. _

Camilla was in a corner of the room one moment, and in the next she was in Harry’s arm. Henry had his arm wrapped around her, and he seemed now to be whispering something in her ear. 

The throwing of a key. The room was swimming, and I couldn’t see anymore.

I fell on my knees just as Henry raised the revolver to his temple. His finger jerked twice, and all was still, even as his head slammed to the left. 

Screaming I could not hear. Fade to black. 

_ Consummatum est. _

⌛︎

There is a hand on my shoulder, shaking me hard, and I jerk up, shaking all over, even as I realised that my eyes were wet, that I had been crying.

“Richard,” Charles was saying, next to me. “Richard, Richard, Richard. Wake up.” 

It took me a while to locate myself in time and space. We were in the basement of the Corcoran house, and Charles was squatting by the mattress I was on.

“Charles,” I said, instinctively grabbing onto his arm. For human warmth, for reassurance that he was here.

He was just squatting there, watching me silently. I wiped at my eyes, and then wiped at my stomach, expecting my hand to come away bloodied. 

“I had a dream,” I said slowly, at last. Trying to think through the fog what I could say and what I could not. “I dreamt that– I dreamt that I was saving Bunny. Trying to save him. I was a time-traveller.” 

Charles nods, still silent. We never know what to say to these revelations of ours, these wishfully tragic little alternative realities where we managed to save Bunny, because the ‘and then what’ was too painful to answer. We knew, that if he were alive, we would all be in jail; well, maybe not me, but the rest. 

“And then– and then I dreamt that you shot me. And that Henry shot himself.”

A thoughtful pause. 

“It’s not uncommon to dream of death at a funeral,” he offered. “Substituting one dead for another.”

“It felt real,” I said, flexing my fingers, trying to get used to the feeling in them. “I haven’t felt as alive as when I was in that dream, jumping around. In time, in space. I really thought– I really thought Henry killed himself.”

Charles only hummed. 

_ finnis _

**Author's Note:**

> I’m Richard Papen, and I can only write stories about Bunny dying. Hit me up at iambi-c.tumblr.com!


End file.
